Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 05
Over the next six weeks, you may run across some of these ads on your net wanderings. If you do, it will be because the patterns of your browsing, the sites you visit and the articles you read, rank you as a promising would-be reader of The Numerati.
As I explained a couple of weeks ago, Houghton Mifflin is doing a behavioral advertising campaign for the book with Platform-A, a division of AOL. (AOL last year bought Tacoda, whose work I describe in the introduction to the book) So, the idea is that we're using the tools and methods of the Numerati to promote the book.
Now I have some details. The campaign, by industry standards, is pretty small. It will deliver some 8 million targeted ads. The first stage, which starts in the next couple of days, will scatter them to a general audience, people in every sort of behavioral tribe imaginable. Some might be romantic movie lovers, others John Deere aficionados. Some may dwell at length on obituary postings. Platform-A will see if any of these groups seem especially interested in the book. They will also note which ads they click on. Some are cheerfully promotional, others much more scary. (One flashing ad says: Meet The Numerati... They've Already Met You.)
On Sept. 15, they will have the data to launch the targeted campaign. They start out with the hypothesis that the two interested groups will be readers of book reviews (the so-called "arts and literature" crowd. I think of them as New Yorker readers) and those interested in "business strategy." Unless the preliminary tests show that another group merits their attention, they'll divide the ads between those two. The business readers will get about 20% more, since they're a larger group.
Continue reading "Behavior targeting campaign for The Numerati: details"
Posted by: Heather Green on September 03
Ahh, the Internet and its metrics.
Net Applications, which tracks browser marketshare, has a report up that's tracking Google hour by hour.
So far, Google's a about 1% marketshare.
Posted by: Heather Green on September 03
One of the things we wondered about Chrome was what kind of data would the company use the browser to collect. Afterall, Google's lifeblood is data. I know from talking to both Firefox and Opera that they don't track your movements.
So good to see Matt Cutts do a post, called When Does Google Chrome Talk to Google.com According to his analysis, so far, so benign.
Lauren Weinstein also did a quick analysis and he seems to agree, with one proviso.
Cutting to the chase, it appears that -- with one exception that I'll discuss below -- Google's Chrome by and large is defined to behave in a conventional manner when it comes to handling of privacy-sensitive data, including the provision of a "private browsing" mode similar to that in the latest version of Internet Explorer.
The only really new privacy-related aspect that may concern some users in Google Chrome appears to be its "Google Suggest" feature tied into the URL address bar. By default this will send information to Google regarding the URLs that you enter directly, to enable URL suggestion data to be returned to the browser from Google. Note though that -- as described on the relevant Google pages -- virtually all of these related features can be disabled by users if they choose to do so.
Speaking with Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land last night, he mentioned that of course this would change if you install the Google Toolbar, for instance. That does send data back to Google. Or search, as well.
Posted by: Stephen Baker on September 03
Ulli Muenker, Our search engine optimization expert visited my office last week. As we talked, she let drop that Blogspotting was a most search-engine-unfriendly name. Who, after all, sits down and decides to look for some "blogspotting?" Other bad SEO titles? Ones with the bloggers' names in them, like Fine On Media and Nussbaum on Design.
But, I said, those were my idea! I urged Bruce and Jon to use their own names in the blogs. It was a way to build their personal brands. Yes, but who looks for a Nussbaum or (tougher for Google) a Fine? Well, I said, I'd bet plenty of people look for NYT brands like Friedman and Dowd. It's in Nussbaum and Fine's interest to have their own brands, and not just be the interchangeable BusinessWeek person covering one thing or another.
But what happens to BW if they leave? she asked. They take their brands with them, I said, and BusinessWeek encourages others to build personal brands. We went back and forth. I never convinced her. But I think this branding battle, between the enterprise and its bloggers, will continue. David Armano, captures some of this dynamic with this illustration:
Posted by: Stephen Baker on August 30
When I look at my book pages on Amazon and B&N, I find an enormous gap. B&N tells customers that people who buy The Numerati also purchase extremely heady books about math (which are way beyond me). They point them to Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought, and Foundations of Measurement, Vol II, Geometrical, Threshhold and Probabilistic Representations!
Now, maybe there are people who bought my book and also bought those. I should alert them, and others, that anyone capable of reading those books will learn next to nothing about math in mine. It's written for a general interest audience. There's not one formula in the book, not one Greek letter. I issue a stark warning in my book blog. (My fear is that they'll buy my book expecting sophisticated math, be disappointed not to find any, and then trash it to their friends and on blogs.)
The Amazon recommendations are entirely different. They point to popular books, like Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin.
What's the difference between the two approaches? I can only guess. Let's assume that they're being honest, and that buyers of my book actually purchase the ones they list. But which ones best represent the readership? It would seem to me that B&N has a set of key words associated with mine (mathematics, calculus, etc) and it links mine to books with similar tags. Amazon, by contrast, appears to pick the books that sell the best. (Irrational and Napkin are both best sellers.) It's not a sophisticated formula. But it makes more sense for me--and for Amazon.
